Category Archives: Psychology

March 3, 2024 · 10:26 am

A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious II

A Subjective Study of Science, Religion, and Consciousness

(This is the second post of three which comprise the preface of my book. If you missed the first one, scroll down to the next post.)

Jung conceived this cycle as a re-adaptation, on progressively higher levels, to the spirit: the dark, unconscious life-energy driving material existence. Under the pressure of this urge to orient us to the inner world, ego begins to feel its identity emerge through a different lens than the worldly scope which shaped its beginnings. It is a change in perspective, analogous to the cultural one today, which reveals that previous values may be relative – not in legal terms of right and wrong but in relation to the history of development and the changing needs of an evolving consciousness.

Beneath our scientific preoccupations, we remain in the stage of psychological awareness reflected in our religious heritage. Behind the curtain of moral judgment lurk the split figures of good and evil: a model of how we relate to our unconscious natures. Jung has described how those ideas reflect the positive and negative poles necessary to produce psychic energy: the sliding scale along which consciousness fluctuates in its on-going efforts to define itself. Just as it forms the path of collective history, so in the growth of the individual in the first half of life, the repression of the unconscious required for ego to strengthen and develop now creates circumstances which signal the need for a new relation to it — to balance conscious direction; to relate it, make it relative to the counter-pole of inner development.

This book is a chronicle in poetic form of my own mid-life transition. It spans sixteen years of effort to understand the ideas conveyed in my dreams. Poetry seemed best suited to express my emotional conflicts, and I wrote down my meditations as the material shaped itself. Certain themes began to stand out; patterns emerged as I gave voice to the unconscious through three figures representing the spiritual and psychological demands urged upon me.

The text is comprised of a kind of dialectic, an exchange of ideas, between those three figures and a fourth representing consciousness. In that sense, the material is not mine; I tried to give expression to the process as it formed in me. I followed the unconscious directives without preconception as to where they might lead, allowing them as far as possible to create their own picture. The result was both a story and an example, an analogy, of Jung’s model: a description of how psychic energy flows toward unconscious aims through the elaboration of ideas.

As I used the third person, The Ancient King emerged as the director of the instinctive urge toward wholeness. He embodies the innate drive to connect us with the religious and philosophical history of who we are beneath our assumptions. The Dark Prince personifies the shadowy intuitions intended to push consciousness to a deeper interpretation of its nature. Those reflections gradually penetrate the collective emotional world of The Unknown Woman. The Oddly Shaped Man is the ego-standpoint as it struggles to comprehend the confusion created by their demands.

To make the text more understandable, several themes must be borne in mind regarding these unconscious demands as the poem proceeds. I have highlighted them for those who may want to refer back to them as they follow their progression:

The Human Animal

Civilization is a comparatively recent product when weighed against the immense stretch of time required for consciousness to emerge from the depths of instinctual nature. The beast tokens our animal ancestry, and the eons-long climb through the darkness of pre-history yet finds it just below the threshold of culture. As a symbol, it relates not only to our biological heritage through the body and its functions but to our sense of individuality, as it is through our bodies that we first experience ourselves as distinct and separate from others.

As humanity developed, the snake in the Garden evolved into Satan in the Old Testament, and both symbolize the opposition needed to distinguish conscious from unconscious. Each toddler repeats this contrary “no” stage in its development, and that opposition is a vital factor in the growth and consolidation of consciousness. It is a basic conflict between a “god-like” self-awareness set against a split-off instinctual heritage. The horns and tail of the Devil later became a graphic description of the animal urges repressed for their gradual conversion into the more humanizing social instincts embraced by Christian ideals.

As the newer myth took hold, the spiritual aim of building the soul, the personal relation to the Deity, sank beneath the weight of a still-developing and over-compensating collective ego, emphasizing the long, serpentine conflicts required for individual evolution. Psychologically and spiritually, ego-effects are a gauge of self-knowledge. Despite centuries of religious exhortation, they remain in much the same state now as in the past. The writer, Philip Wylie, described this idea as “the fatuous awe of the ape with the mirror.” The ape points not only to a stunted inner life but to regressive tendencies which both conceal and reveal the psychological dawn of those who would recognize and act upon their own inner opposition.

Nature and the Unconscious

This theme revolves around the image of the earth as a natural symbol of the unconscious. The earth and sun are the sources of all known life, suitable metaphors for the masculine and feminine forces which conceive it. Jung and Neumann have demonstrated that artifacts and symbols dating back to pre-patriarchal cultures intimately associate masculinity with light and consciousness, just as feminine images are associated with unconscious darkness and fertility: the earthly and the feminine, the creative matrix which bears and fosters the child of consciousness. Symbolically, masculinity refers to the heady principles of thought, the organizing of consciousness; the feminine principle dissolves separate tendencies to form emotional and physical relationships – properties of the soul.

The primitive mind long ago conceived the sun as spirit, reflecting processes which urged the coming of light to the dark, unconscious void of human origin. Earth and sun are psychological analogues for “feminine” relatedness — the oneness of the unconscious, the body, and the individual — and the dissecting, masculine character of consciousness. Together, they express the intermingling pairs of opposites and the penetrating form of their relationship. Male and female, spirit and matter, mind and body: all describe the two poles required for conscious orientation.

Primitive sun-worship anticipated a Christian myth “not of this world”. Both signify the urge to distinguish conscious from unconscious, just as it is repeated in the individual. The movement away from nature toward an artificial fantasy-sphere is a projection of over-extension. Jung and Neumann suggested that the natural process of separating the two psychic systems has deepened into such a division today that we can no longer relate to our instinctual foundations – a kind of collective mid-life change in the centering and organizing processes of the psyche. Our intellectual inflation only accentuates our historical opposition to nature and the corresponding functions designed to relate us to earthly reality.

As the momentum of this drive toward conscious identity finds us alienated from ourselves, the unconscious attempts to re-orient us in the current swing by steering us back to itself, to nature and the earth, to our physical/emotional ground. The swing toward natural science describes a symbolic movement. The spiritual unfolding of our natures speaks only indirectly through its own language.

The creative spirit turns destructive when it is restricted to conscious aims and remains unconscious for too long, when a new stage is signaled. Our systematic abuse of the earth reveals an inner conflict: the oscillating poles of spirit and matter seek the undeveloped functions still in the sway of the old stage. The artificial environment we have created in the relatively short swing back to the material world exposes our Christian disdain for nature as a symbol of our animal heritage and a “god-like” ego which cannot accept its origins or its subjection to natural laws. We are literally poisoning ourselves and our children, even as exaggerated fantasies pursue grandiose notions of “conquering” space — still driven by an inflated and unanchored ego which sees itself as “not of this world.”

Ego and Intellect

The identification of ego with intellect contributes to this problematic conception of nature. It long slumbered in Christian theology as identification with an otherworldly God and a disdain for natural life: an image of self-rejection – one of the reasons guilt weighs so heavily in traditional religious ideas. Both are compounded through this identity, the idea of a Deity now yielding to science as it dissolves the metaphysical projections. For all our rational knowledge, we remain driven by the repressed “natural man” who serves the sensual world of material desire – just as he did many thousands of years ago. He personifies the unconscious need for a wider psychological perspective than just an intellectual one – and the internal guilt we never came to terms with because we never understood the reasons for it.

The uneven advance of self-knowledge finds no adequate ideas that would relate us to the ancient symbols and their functions, their irrational truths repressed for lack of understanding. They sink back into the unconscious where they become hostile adversaries. Due to changes in consciousness, they resurface in different guise today, though we remain possessed by their “suprapersonal” powers – paradoxically more distant now than ever. As our relation to ourselves is no longer expressed in the old images, the humbling effects of a higher authority dwindle into vague personal beliefs with no real emotional experience to support them. The result is a “puffing up of the ego-sphere” and the “brutish egotism” to which Neumann referred: an exaggerated urge to individuality which has lost its relation to itself and the world.

From the scientific perspective, religious images are only fantasies. For the less developed intellect of the past, they served to influence thought’s exclusive tendencies. The objective trend today requires a new interpretation of the values they represent. The conflicts of the soul, the emotional tensions determining our deepest relations in the context of a greater whole, are projected onto fractional interests and ideologies with ever more threatening consequences.

Only the hard work of introspection can free the individual from the self-flattering and contradictory influences of ego. The recognition of a higher inner authority beyond will and intellect is a philosophical and religious process meant to bind us to humanity and our natural environment. For science to serve those greater purposes, its aims must be subject to a broader conception of psychic life.

Causality and Purpose

The causal thinking which orients our perception is opposed to the heavy, symbolic language of the unconscious. The one leads backward in time to a cause that produces effects, and the other leads forward to a purpose or goal without conceiving a cause. As a concept, the latter allows the thoughts, feelings, and intuitions evoked by images and symbols to shape themselves; to relate their associations to the pursuit of aims beyond conscious preconception.

Jung saw the idea of time as a primitive concept of energy, a gradient of potential, in that it flows forward in an irreversible way. This is an approximate analogy for his model of psychic energy and the reason time is capitalized in the text when referred to by the figures representing the unconscious. We can reverse it in our minds as in casual thought, but we should be aware that we are projecting subjective ideas onto the objective behavior of processes outside consciousness.

Each individual sees the world a little differently according to his/her personal interpretations: Jung’s “subjective factor”. He stressed that it is “one of the necessary conditions under which all thinking takes place.” We may agree on certain general ways of thinking, but this in no way relieves them of their subjective quality. It is conscious thought which subjectivizes the ideas we associate. The historical advance from collective thinking to individual differentiation accentuates this subjective influence. The tendency toward specialization and the proliferation of “isms” attests this movement. Though still veiled by symbolic mythical influences, the undeveloped seeds of individuality are gradually emerging through the dense fog of collective history – or at least attempting to.

The opposition between causal thought and the forward movement of the unconscious, along with the projection of subjective viewpoints, create contradictions in our thinking. When looking inward, one of the most perplexing ones is the backward flow of dream-images as they draw on past experience. This paradox reflects the double meaning inherent in unconscious imagery, just as it is the basis of the causal view. The opposites are still fused together in the unconscious; it is the discriminating effect of consciousness that splits the original image and reveals only the partial aspect of its focus. Only the two forms of perceiving combined can give us a wider sense of who we are beneath our one-sided presumptions.

Past, present, and future are a single dynamic process in the unconscious. One of the functions of dreams is to express this creative flow through analogies with present circumstances. Since analogies describe how different sets of experiences conform, dreams often express immediate concerns through memory-images. They reveal the conformities of past and present events, our reactions to them, and the anticipations of tendencies which shape our futures. Jung stated: “Everything psychic is pregnant with the future.”

Religious Images

Because it consists of a living history of our mental functioning, Jung wrote that any serious inquiry into the unconscious leads straight into the religious problem. This theme fully emerges in the second part of the book. As the poem proceeds, the intuitive side of religious ideas is explored. Job was the older anticipation of the individual who confronts the collective background to discover his or her own way; in so doing, a dialogue is entered into with the unconscious.

Job had achieved the material tasks of the first part of life. His faith, his connection to the Deity, was then tested through Jehovah’s bargain with Satan. The bargain represents the interplay of opposites: the deeper unconscious process which precedes awareness. Job’s sufferings comprised the circumstances which compelled him to reflect on, to make conscious, this inner exchange. According to the analogies of that time, Job’s afflictions were depicted physically; today we would interpret them as projections of psychic conflicts. If we take the concrete qualities out of the figures and translate them into ideas, as we might attempt to do with our dreams, we can begin to see how they analogize psychic processes.

When we reflect on these stories, we may grasp their symbolic meanings by relating them to our own emotional conditions. Christ, as the Son of Man, was a later anticipation of development; an ideal image of the individual which emerged from the spiritual darkness and brutality of antiquity for the purpose of further transforming our animal natures. His crucifixion is a powerful analogy of the tension of psychic opposites encountered by one who turns inward, away from the material world, and begins to discern his/her personal values apart from prevailing views.

As with Job, it is no coincidence that the myth of Christ revolved around his crucifixion at the mid-life point. Today, the spiritual changes reflected in the tasks of individuation stand, too, as a prototype of development in a new age. Just as these tasks make demands on those compelled to confront them, so they reverberate in the collective unconscious. Psychic reality is coming to bear on our times.

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February 1, 2024 · 7:13 am

A MID-LIFE PERSPECTIVE: CONVERSATIONS WITH THE UNCONSCIOUS

A Subjective Study of Science, Religion, and Consciousness

(This post and the following two posts will comprise the preface to my book of the same title. )

Preface

More and more people today feel a lack of meaning in traditional religious values. Thousands of years of devotion which once found us praying for salvation are distant relics to the priorities of modern thought. The old metaphysical view has little in common with an increasingly scientific outlook fastened onto the material world.

The swing toward natural reality from earlier preoccupations with the spiritual realm has produced a body of facts so opposed to religious faith that the moral and ethical principles of just a generation ago are now recognizable in name only. As new clashes with old, the quest for knowledge obscures the need for wisdom.

Centuries of spiritual idealism which sought to develop the soul have instead convinced us that we have only to believe in it to achieve it – for those who can still believe. For those who can’t, a new ideal of material progress now discards the too-taxing task of looking inward as not worth the effort.

Media-driven thing-obsession and near compulsive consumption divert vital energies. Ever more advanced technologies draw us further outside ourselves and into devices. Instant access and constant exposure to the subliminal effects of marketing and advertising cultivate unconscious emotions so paradoxical that what is meant to emancipate and connect also finds us dependent and alienated — our most personal and intimate needs indistinguishable from carefully instilled, pre-packed desires.

A struggling clergy, unable to translate the older values into contemporary terms, cannot defend its views in the face of rational argument. Literally interpreted, religious symbols not only don’t make sense to a science based on observable facts, they appear ridiculous and even silly. Worn half-truths and a declining relevance find modern mega-churches resorting to the same impersonal strategies driving business and political interests: mass commercial appeal. Science and religion have become adversaries competing for consumers; the individual, an insignificant statistic buried under the anonymity of target groups, market niches, and sales pitches.

I first perceived these anxieties as personal problems. I felt that something was missing in my life, sensed only as vague needs somehow opposed to my intentions. Seeking clarity, I turned to the psychological studies of C.G. Jung and his colleague, Erich Neumann. With the aid of Jung’s model, I began to understand that my feelings also reflected deeper conflicts beneath our assumptions of who we are and how we see our place in the natural world. As the religious view fades and the scientific one replaces it, an uneasy apprehension steals behind a facade of certainty.

A major shift in perspective accompanies today’s fast-paced super-highways of information. Jung’s and Neumann’s comparative studies of consciousness revealed patterns — evolutionary swings in its focus throughout history. They saw such shifts as reflections of unconscious organizing and centering functions. Their purpose is to re-orient us at certain critical stages to the more diffuse aims of spiritual and psychological development. Until recently, those aims were the province of religion and philosophy. That has changed. The beginning of the new stage is marked by a revolutionary discovery in the trend toward objective inquiry: the old metaphysical images proved to be the symbolic language of an unconscious psyche.

The discovery and its implications are largely ignored. The dark past of our moral history then opened to deeper scrutiny instead sees modern sensibilities rejecting the new knowledge. The grounds for its denial are not far to seek: this latest swing toward technology bodes a frightening new confrontation with our destructive tendencies. The repressed anxiety sensed by ego at an in-depth inspection of itself finds the old fear of God still alive beneath our diversions – and with good reason.

In The Origins and History of Consciousness, Erich Neumann described this shift in values: “Typical and symptomatic of this transitional phenomenon is the state of affairs in America, though the same holds good for practically the whole Western hemisphere… The grotesque fact that murderers, brigands, thieves, forgers, tyrants, and swindlers, in a guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time. Their unscrupulousness and double-dealing are recognized — and admired. Their ruthless energy they obtain at best from some stray archetypal content that has got them in its power. The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because in its one-track primitivity, it suffers none of the differentiations which make men human.”

“Worship of the “beast” is not confined to Germany; it prevails wherever one-sidedness, push, and moral blindness are applauded, i.e., wherever the aggravating complexities of civilized behavior are swept away by bestial rapacity. One has only to look at the educative ideals current in the West. The possessed character of our financial and industrial magnates… is psychologically evident from the very fact that they are at the mercy of a suprapersonal factor – “work,” “power,” “money,” or whatever they like to call it – which in the telling phrase “consumes” them and leaves little or no room as private persons. Coupled with a nihilistic attitude toward civilization there goes a puffing up of the ego-sphere which expresses itself with brutish egotism in a total disregard for the common good…”

Neumann outlined the social effects of this transition: “Not only power, money, and lust, but religion, art, and politics as exclusive determinants in the form of parties, sects, movements, and “isms” of every description take possession of the masses and destroy the individual.”

The emotional confusion generated by such a major shift in values is only enhanced today by a profound lack of introspection. The “suprapersonal factors” embodied in religious images are intended to orient us inwardly; to center and protect us from being swept away by mass contagion. Our ideas of religion are changing, and there is no return to the old ways. Deep in the throes of unseen psychic forces, consciousness is being pushed in a new direction. The possibilities for further development hidden in the older ideas require a re-interpretation of the peculiar language of the depth from which they spring and the symbols it produces.

An important distinction must be made between sign and symbol: Jung defined a symbol as an image of the unknown. A sign stands for something known; it contains only the information we have put into it. Symbols evoke unconscious complexes of ideas which draw us to their many possible meanings and our relation to them. Just as science is concerned primarily with a concrete world of objects, religious images, too, are viewed as “things” containing only the beliefs that have been put into them, interpreting them more literally as signs than symbols.

Self-awareness means to perceive the inner world as well as the outer one. The one-sidedness of our current rational trend, a reaction to the religious view, has resulted in a new extreme in focus. To think logically, intellect must repress emotion; to the degree that we identify with it, we are at odds with ourselves. The over-reliance on one function to the exclusion of others is a threat to our psychic balance. The unconscious attempts to restore equilibrium by creating circumstances through unintended and “accidental” consequences which form an inner counter-pole to conscious direction: the basis of the tension of opposites, their relativity, and the swings produced by changes from within.

Because a limited will only partially creates our conditions, the deeper effects of our actions are shrouded by the veil of conscious intent. We also react to inner circumstances which are just as real as the outer ones, unseen by the fascination with the sensual and concrete. What we see and what we can’t see are determined by the concepts which shape our perceptions. A different conceptual view is required to grasp the effects of the psychic reality we can’t see: a symbolic one.

These ideas are the general concerns of this book. They describe the analogical thinking needed to bridge the divide between the scientific and religious views – the two ends of a psychic spectrum which determine how we see ourselves and the world. Their comparison is an important step in understanding the diversions and obsessions which have us in their hold; to reduce the severity in the swings of the pendulum between our dual natures. As cultural institutions, these viewpoints are obstinate to change, and nature seeks development through the creative responses of the individual. Group conflicts originate in the individual, and the opposed forces defining them can only be confronted and resolved there.

The text describes this confrontation in terms of the individuation process as conceived by Jung. His research confirms the mid-life process as the emergence of a more personal, inward call to self than the social orientation of the first half. Its purpose is to deepen relations with the spiritual functions which have always guided us. They are synonymous with development, and coming to terms with them today is an individual problem. Once the herd instinct takes over and fixes onto an ideal, it remains static; only individuals are capable of introducing new perceptions of it.

Though the book revolves around the mid-life experience, the continuity of development prepares it long before its intrusion into consciousness. In the first half, as we adapt to social conditions, a relatively dormant individuality is repressed in favor of cultural demands. The repressions accumulate over the initial stages, gaining energy until they form a complex of problems. We are then confronted with what the earlier view was not conditioned to see: the psychic reality behind appearances. This process creates an expanding spiral of evolution, and it follows the same guiding pattern in the individual, in condensed form, as in the history of the species.

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August 1, 2023 · 4:38 am

Observations on Politics

“They’re fighters, so they say, for Freedom’s rights/More closely scanned, it’s slave with slave who fights.” — Goethe

The political landscape has changed since Jung shared his observations in 1957. Religious values, however rudely conceived, seem to appeal only to a fast-shrinking minority whose leadership is increasingly irrelevant today (except when useful to image-seeking politicians). But, the facts of nature that science would educate us to are no more incorporated or adhered to than were the religious ideals of two thousand years ago.

The compensations for the repression of the soul, the reality of the individual, are relentlessly squeezed into biased and impersonal ideologies at best: the only emotional harbor for the mass social units under the direction of those manipulating them for their own ends. But, as Jung wrote:

“The rulers… are just as much social units as the ruled… distinguished only by the fact that they are specialized mouthpieces of the State Doctrine. They do not need to be personalities capable of judgment, but thoroughgoing specialists who are unusable outside their line of business. State policy decides what shall be taught and studied.“

Today, rather than, “State policy”, we might say, “majority ideology”; though those vying for it are so polarized that a single overview can’t describe the conflicting ideas in them. Jung’s observations still apply:

“The… doctrine is for its part manipulated in the name of… policy by those occupying the highest positions in the government, where all the power is concentrated. Whoever, by election or caprice, gets into one of these positions is subject to no higher authority; he is the… policy itself and within… limits… can proceed at his own discretion… He is thus the only individual or, at any rate, one of the few… who could make use of their individuality if only they knew how to differentiate themselves from the… doctrine.

“They are more likely, however, to be the slaves of their own fictions. Such one-sidedness is always compensated psychologically by unconscious subversive tendencies. Slavery and rebellion are inseparable correlates. Hence, rivalry for power and exaggerated mistrust pervade the entire organism from top to bottom… To compensate its chaotic formlessness, a mass always produces a “Leader,” who… becomes the victim of his own inflated ego-consciousness.”

Modern conditions may be more complicated than George Orwell’s, ‘Big Brother’, once suggested, though their effects are similar. The concentration of power is more diffuse; the “Leader” more a figure-head for those behind the scenes dictating policy through the buying and selling of influence. Mass media and commercial manipulation accomplish the same goals more easily through benign subversion and gas-lighting than threat and intimidation (though these means are also employed). Still, the facts of its unconscious reality will sooner or later be impressed on an inflated ego.

“This development becomes logically unavoidable the moment the individual combines with the mass and thus renders himself obsolete. Apart from the agglomeration of huge masses in which the individual disappears anyway, one of the chief factors responsible for psychological mass-mindedness is scientific rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity. As a social unit he has lost his individuality and becomes a mere abstract number in the bureau of statistics. He can only play the role of an interchangeable unit of infinitesimal importance.“

It’s an historical fact that only the individual’s creative responses to collective conflicts point the way to different perceptions of them. The personal “neuroses” of today are symbolic representations of the conscious psychic functions of tomorrow, and as more and more individuals are forced to confront themselves through them, so they may create a new attitude to the psychological facts of our conditions. But:

“Looked at rationally and from outside… it seems positively absurd to go on talking about the value or meaning of the individual. Indeed, one can hardly imagine how one ever came to endow individual human life with so much dignity when the truth to the contrary is as plain as the palm of your hand…

“Under these circumstances it is small wonder that individual judgment grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized… and delegated to a corporate body. In this way the individual becomes more and more a function of society… whereas, in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea… The State [the ideology] in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it.”

A new brand of regressive tribalism is forming today as a reaction to the alienation and atomization of the individual through the distorted collective under-currents which produced it. “Grievance politics” and the most transparent negative projections onto political opponents now characterize party affiliations. So over-fervent are the participants in their beliefs that even the most glaring hypocrisies are accepted and pursued without question.

As is generally the case with such “true believers”, the problems lie on a deeper level than the surface issues would suggest. Individual complexes are psychological facts that can’t be altered by collective processes — and when enough of them gravitate together through their similar dissatisfactions, a minority ideology accumulates and begins to clamor for attention.

It appears that the atomized and alienated individual of today is drawn toward tribalized groups more obsessed with similarly-minded dissatisfactions than with common ideology — a broadening of vague ideological tendencies based more on grievance than ideal. This is the definition of the projection of the shadow — and the only means by which it may be recognized and incorporated into consciousness. But, this recognition can only occur with reflection and self-examination by the individual.

Guess What? You’re an Animal II

One of the central themes in Philip Wylie’s book, The Magic Animal, is that, owing to the established fact of man’s territoriality, and since he has entered the dimension of time-awareness, he stakes out his territory in time, so to speak; that is to say, he defends the imaginary territories described by his ideologies, beliefs, and ideas just as animals defend their physical territory (as man does, as well).

One of the things that separates man from animals in that respect, however, is that man kills and destroys to defend his territory (and to acquire more territory), instead of the ritualized (i.e., moral) fight/flight response that prevails in the rest of the animal kingdom. This idea was discussed in depth by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, in his book, On Aggression, to which Wylie refers.

With that in mind, let’s continue (see my previous post below) Wylie’s description of man’s imaginary world:

“Perhaps it would be of use, here, to consider specifically how we attribute reality to what is imaginary, and what that leads us to fabricate as objects for our imagined ends. To some, the following example will have been understood. But for many it may be a little new and so, a little helpful. Once it is seen (or, correctly imagined) that even our sensory and other animal awarenesses are but dreams on which dreamed territory is founded and spuriously held — the record of what all man has, is, does, did, and intends will take on so many new and more nearly proper shapes, that everything will be an example of that new means of understanding.

Once that image of our condition is adopted, all morals will need revision, all ideas and artifacts, review.

Let us imagine, however, a man looking from a window of his home at a typical suburban scene.

Does he realize that most of what he sees derives from a moral fantasy so incorrect and ill-conceived as to be a threat to his very species? Does he even recognize another truth, that the “who” looking on is his own invention, not real, and in its main part anti-real? Is he even able to consider that what he thinks of it is a set of feelings, rationalized into his notion of sense?

Does he note that his reactions to the scene are not real, either? Not real but a product of beliefs, ideals, and values that were, themselves invented by other men? Or by himself? Hardly!

What he beholds is therefore not even felt by any other man exactly as he feels it. But they employ parallel processes.

The houses, streets, and vehicles are presumed to furnish the best currently possible means to his own and his neighbors’ needs, comforts, luxuries, and aesthetic or other desires.

But many of these objects have their form and function because the owner was induced to imagine he needed or wanted them, not because that was the actual case. Many, also, were fabricated to enhance his and his neighbors’ sense of status on a purely imagined value scale, dreamed up for the end of making him believe he had a need, or a want, till he bought the thing claimed to fulfill synthetic desire.

And all these artifacts are imagined valuable by him in short term ways, alone.

Only recently, and only a little, has this looker-out even been able to be aware that what he has thitherto imagined as wholly good in this scene isn’t. The exhaust of passing cars, the fecal trail of jet planes overhead, the silent surge of his own and his neighbors’ sewers, the waste that the city garbage trucks collect, the smoke from a visible backyard incinerator, the DDT a man across the way is spraying on his shrubs, and endless other items connected with the scene are not pure boons but partly malign. What should have entered the imagining, here so incompletely exploited, now somewhat shows the suburban achievement is not sound.

But even a more than ordinarily imaginative beholder will hardly increase his use of imagination enough to contemplate his view in a broad relation to its net cost for future men, through waste and pollution and irretrievable devastations of earth’s resources.

Likely, the traditional American values of the man in the window — and false logics he has accepted — will prevent him from any true evaluation of what he considers reality. The Great Society will emerge, in his dream, as more and more people are born, to consume more and more goods and employ more and more services. The absolute cost and self-limiting fact of such a fantasy will not much register with him, if at all. He will reason, as did a young woman, who recently said to me as I spoke of these matters, “They’ll think of something.”

“They” will “think”, then, of ways to reduce the pollution and to repair the ruin of man’s terrestrial environment. Of substitutes for whatever is being or will be annihilated or exhausted of the materials man derives from living species and inert matter. Ways, she meant, that would allow the crescendo of human consumption by that ever-accelerated proliferation of commodities and services. And of people.

The young lady, when I asked, could not “think of something,” herself. She plainly felt my question both unwarranted and mean. Yet she was a college graduate, and as I was told by the lady who introduced us, “very brilliant.” Her brilliance was the near-universal American sort, flashy and so, small-gauge, a fixed point of present-time dazzle, scanning nothing else. Its irresponsible focus is as minute as near universal and will write the signature of our doom if it persists much longer in that meager degree. What she imagined as logical and true, what she assumed from our tradition, was as mistaken as faith in human sacrifice for the appeasement of the God Bubb.

She could never look across a suburban street and perceive that what her eye beheld was a scene not real, not logical, not true, as purpose, but only a clutter of imagined artifacts created without consideration for future-time. Solid enough in seeming and as things, but the spawn of dangerous dreams in fact. And she’d not ever discern how false her feelings were.

How insubstantial are all our values!

Return, for illustration, to the homeowner looking at his suburban scene. The house across the street was built, let’s say, by a Mr. Williams. He and his lovely wife, two charming sons, and two delightful daughters lived there till recently. Then Mr. Williams sold the house to Mr. Johnson. Who has a lovely wife, charming boys, girls, etc. Both men are high school superintendents. Mr. Johnson, the new resident owner, is more learned than Mr. Williams, more talented, handsomer, and better paid. Mrs. Johnson is far lovelier than Mrs. Williams. In every measurable way, the new neighbors are either like the former people or superior to them. There is one difference, but it is minute, a matter of their relative amounts of dermal melanin. The Johnsons are Negroes, and the first Negroes to buy and occupy a house in this suburb.

Now, how do the values of the man at the window change?

Again, suppose we are not looking out that window but showing an album of photographs, taken there, to a bright boy fifty years from now.

How will his imagination evaluate the same scene?

Will he exclaim, as the album leaves turn, “All that room for just one family! Look! The people getting into that car — going to the city, you said — forgot to take along their breathing gear. They’ll have to come home. Or smother! All those men in that other car, the ones you told me were leaving for New York — a thousand miles away? Have they got throughway permits? And assigned times for entering the throughway? You mean anybody could go anywhere on any road, without a permit or a starting time? Imagine!

“And all the kinds of trees and bushes and vines and flowers growing completely outdoors! My, it must have been confusion when so many things could grow that they practically made a jungle in anybody’s yard! And — let me see — two, three, four kids. In that one family! They sure must have gotten a high gene rating on the federal tests to be allowed so many! I wish my father and mother had passed that high. Then maybe I could have a brother. Or a sister. Still. People in those olden days had worse problems then we have now. Like — cancer. And all those diseases. Hardly anybody lived a hundred years, either. And now, most everybody can, and millions already are a hundred.”

Will that be the sort of reaction of a youngster, in half a century, to our small scene?

Will such a boy go on, this way, “All that what-you-call-it? Yard! It’s about a thousand times the square meters we get in our flat. And people cooked at home, too! Whatever they wanted to eat! Even outdoors on that — that — barbecue? I’d like, just once not to be handed the standard meal from the air chute. And I’d like — once, anyway — to be able to start walking in any old direction as far as I pleased, and no permit, and come, even, to the end of the city, and then go on in that noplace, any direction, where there might not be people, or crops and machines, and I might even perhaps come to wild trees, finally!“

That?

Or would such a boy say, of the same pictures:

“My! That was really ancient times! Look at the smoke! Look how close together people were! How they could even see into each others’ houses! And the raw meat they half-cooked on that fire-thing. The lousy prepared food they ate! And the waste! Think of mining and raising all that junk, just to build crummy hovels like those! Ugly, uncomfortable — and, you said? — torn down in twenty years? Out of style already? How crazy could people have been? Why make anything not to last? Look at those clothes, too! And warm day, I’d say! Boys and girls, all in those sex costumes. And, didn’t I read, not allowed even to undress together? Were they nuts? Didn’t the mother and father even like sex? The kids, too?

The fifty years have passed since Wylie wrote those words, and we haven’t quite reached the extent of over-population and air pollution he foresaw — yet. But those circumstances are near — and probably nearer than we think, as we carry on our daily lives mostly oblivious to those rapidly approaching conditions.

If you think your rights are being infringed by wearing a mask or being vaccinated to protect our public health from a pandemic virus, imagine what life will be like with the necessary restrictions described by the hypothetical boy viewing the photo album. And these are relatively small examples of how easily objective reality is refuted and rationalized by many folks today.

For an example of the confrontation with psychic reality, read here.

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Tagged as human consumption, ideologies and beliefs, man's territoriality, objective reality, Philip Wylie's The Magic Animal, traditional American values

August 13, 2021 · 12:52 pm

Guess What? You’re an Animal

“A little better would he live, poor wight, had you not given him that gleam of heavenly light. He calls it Reason only to pollute its use by being brutaler than any brute.” Mephistopheles to the Lord — from Faust, by Goethe

Sure, you say. I know that technically, humans are animals. But we’re really more than animals, aren’t we? Well, let’s take a closer look at just how we differ from animals and how we’re similar:

“All man does with his “mind” or “psyche” (or with his brain and nervous wiring and his body) that animals are not able to do, or can do only slightly better, is but a single act: He imagines. Imagination, as people involved in the study of man fail to perceive, is the underlying source of the other processes of mind to which we give so many absurdly nit-picking and hair-splitting names.“

It’s been over fifty years since Philip Wylie wrote those words, and one could question whether we’ve advanced at all during that span, concerning natural reality, our knowledge of it, or even our acceptance of it. Today, we can’t even agree on the facts of ############# and the realities of their cause and effect relationships. All that aside, it may help matters to step back and take a look at the biological facts beneath the millions of subjective human realities that contend with (and deny and subvert, twist and misinterpret) the natural reality we’ve been confronted with since life began on this planet:

Wylie, in his last book, The Magic Animal (1968), gives us a glimpse of what might happen in this natural world when an animal confronts man for the first time:

“…Consider then, a mammal, good-sized, faced for the first time by another, unknown creature of cryptic (and so, perhaps, dangerous) sort. A panther, or tiger, say, with no inherited, learned, or prior personal knowledge of what now appears before it: a man.

The situation sets up the familiar alternative-choice problem: fight or flee…The panther or tiger has sense perceptions only slightly different from our own though some are sharper. Still, it’s picture (imagined) of the real world more or less corresponds to man’s. Light and shadow, perspective, relative size, distances, colors, number of objects around it, are sensed in a way we comprehend. So are smells, if any, and most things smell. Such sounds, too, within auditory range: rustle of leaves, crunching halt of man. distant bawl of ungulate, chitter of near birds. The animal is “aware” of all those, or could become aware on notice of need.

It is similarly aware, or able to be, of itself — as body and so as furred and hairy, as warm or cold, as breathing, as toothed, clawed, as very powerful in its environs and pretty safe from predation. As, perhaps, having a mate and cubs, somewhere near, as hungry or not, or thirsty; and aware of such data in relation to many other creatures, when they are present, as well as its kind, as panther, tiger in sufficient degree to recognize other panthers, tigers, and the rules for their own species responses. But now its awareness rises one level. It perceives its first man and about this creature it has no such “knowledge.” Here is an animal, obviously, but one with crimson head-hair, red fur down to the place where blue, slick skin begins; and below that, black feet. Standing like a bear on two legs. With a complex aroma so unfamiliar as to be incomprehensible — unless, perhaps, in part, a sweaty scent of fear.

But what to do? What not? Flee and lose face for no cause? Fight, and risk being killed? The panther will flee almost always. Not, though, the tiger perhaps. And our panther may have cubs behind and a lamed mate and a sense that their defense is more important, perhaps, than other risk. Not of death but of defeat — since the panther cannot foresee death. Stress rises, and awareness of stress, another lift of level in awareness.

Without any conscious effort, automatically and in a split second of time, the panther runs its baffling image of man through its cerebral computer for analysis and analogue. All the heritage of its ancestral beings is stored there in shorthand form and also the enormous library of panther facts. Its own experience is coded there, too. If the other animal were familiar that sorting would suffice when checked against the panther’s present situation, and its current mood, its individual nature, cubs to defend, matters of territory, and the rest. It would then know what to do , or not, from its innate moral order.

That knowledge would not be palpable to it as such. All the computer will finally furnish is a cue in the form of a feeling, that is a sensed result of an evaluation, for what could and would be translated into the appropriate act — a leap toward, or away from, the other being. Or even the ignoring of it, a passing on, alongside, or a skirting of it.

But this panther has to decide without any complete way of evaluating the data and then experiencing the correct feeling for action. Or non-action. This state involves a still higher level of awareness, a sense of stress that obliges the creature to be aware of itself as under pressure and as forced to imagine what to do — using time and past experience to the degree they may help for that end. Whatever the panther or tiger then does is the result of a feeling it gets by imagining itself in a new way, so as to imagine something about the unknown reality it faces for evaluation, all alone, to get an individual feeling. It will conjure up a feeling that will lead to its act, appropriate or no.

People have that identical capacity but in an unlimited degree or one nearly unlimited. The human computer can be programmed in as many ways as can be imagined including insane ways. But what the human being does to “think” is merely to react to a feeling that is the aware end product of reference to a stored value system, sensory, learned and personally encoded. If it were not so, what people say to each other in a five minute phone conversation would take a year or two. Our statements, questions, answers, opinions, exchanges of verbal symbols of every sort — all these — arise nearly instantaneously but after computer-like evaluation. They represent translations to feelings, not thoughts. To mere sensations that are the “print-out” of automated process. These are retranslated as verbal symbols in our phone talk.

In face-to-face talk they are also translated into the vocal inflections (that the phone carries, too), but the spectrum of kinesic “talk” is now visible. Often without the exhibitor’s awareness. Hands, brow, eye rims, a hundred or perhaps many thousands of bodily movements, give clues of the speaker’s evaluations, which are often opposite to or different from his verbal statements. So we are preposterous when we assert we are rational and fair, just and equable, lucid and reasoning. We but imagine that.

We imagine it and act out the imaginary “reality” exactly as does the animal, panther or beetle, to their limits. Nothing or near-nothing in our aware activities is reasoned. All is imaginary. And nothing is true, in consequence. All is merely an evaluation of images we ascribe to ourselves and then project on others, the world of matter, realms of “belief”, theory, and even admitted images. We do not have access to any dependable, fundamental data.

We do not know what the universe is or why it exists. We cannot know “who” we are and merely cling to imaginary notions about that. Our perceptions, sensory or fictitious, are not the accurate, dependable concepts we assume. We cannot hear most of the vibrations that seem to us the whole of sound. Our ability to sense the electromagnetic wave spectrum is minute. We sense more only with the aid of apparatus. Our sense of smell is probably one thousandth of that of some insects, a billionth of the smell range.

What most of us, most of the time, and all of us some of the time, conceive of as “self” and as “another,” or as “communication,” and as “intelligence,” “reality,” suitable “judgments” and so on is but a fragmentary image of limited evaluation rendered as a feeling. Thought, reason, logic, the entire rest of the human aware acts, and those unaware, too, are artifacts, themselves end products of images.

Even “original thought,” a supposedly purely intellectual act, is the result of a feeling. Before the genius makes the step forward that abets human progress, evaluation will have led to a feeling that leads to his new image, poem, sonata, or scientific theory. And to the scientist who now demurs, who insists, perhaps, that there is “more” to art, creative thought, and the discovery of “new concepts or categories” than that, it might be asked, at least, with a certain potential of elucidation: Why did he choose to become a mathematician, biologist, chemist?

For unless a career, or an errand downtown, is the response to a feeling, the career or errand do not take place. The innate right-wrong programming of the individual is involved to every end, and it gives all the directions there are for living things. In that basic and unarguable way it can be stated that all “thought” and all other allegedly discrete or detached “intellectual” processes are but rationalizations of feelings. Rationalizations made unconsciously of evaluations the moral machine printed out. The results can be good or bad, gain or loss, mental achievement or madness. The source is one; the process, single; the whole affair, to the point of action, imagined.”

So ends my first post on Wylie’s, The Magic Animal. I’ve quoted it at length rather than paraphrase it, because I think it’s important to read in its original form, and that what he has to say about our predicament is singularly educated and accurate. All of Wylie’s writings were based on Jung’s psychology, and anyone who reads them will find that he follows it very closely. And lest you may have forgotten about my own writing, it, too, follows Jung’s concepts very closely. Read about my book here.

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January 23, 2021 · 8:42 am

A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

A momentous shift in values is taking place today. Dwarfed by the fascination with technology, the wisdom of the soul sinks under the weight of concrete knowledge. Science and religion have become adversaries; the individual, a mere tool for powerful interest groups. Our dual natures are increasingly brought into relief by ideological and political conflicts, the split in our personalities reflected back to us as in a mirror. — Evan Hanks

This post is about a book of poetry — but, it is first and foremost a psychological work. As such, it is a spiritual one, for the aims of psychology are (or should be) inseparable from those of religion and philosophy; namely, to define human consciousness in relation to the instinctual psyche.

Based on the psychology of C. G. Jung and inspired by Goethe’s Faust, this book is a chronology, in poetic language, of the change in perspective prompted by the mid-life transition.

Jung wrote that the unconscious has been engaged in this process over hundreds of thousands of years, and for most, it guides them through it with relatively little friction. But for those who are deeply moved by it, it is a spiritual and psychological journey which leads into the individuation process.

This process involves coming to terms with the unconscious, and the change in thinking required for it is founded on the conflict of opposites. It has many parallels with the cultural shift in values we are experiencing today. The old religious view of good and evil is giving way to a rational, scientific one which only further splits our notions of reality. Science has dissolved the metaphysical images of the past and conceived a new objectivity. So fascinated by it is this new-found vantage point, it assumes that it can be applied to the psyche as it is to the physical world. It cannot. The psychic world of images is only indirectly based on concrete reality.

Jung has demonstrated that what we identify with as consciousness is only one partial complex of associations in an animal psyche forged over eons of evolution. To add to this problem, Jung saw the intellect as only one among a set of balancing functions which orient perception. As an information processor, it must be supplemented by its opposite, feeling, to give it meaning and value in the context of a greater whole.

Along with the subjective nature of consciousness, the alternating development of opposing functions only compounds the problem of observing ourselves with any verifiable objectivity. Consciousness changes over time, and we have no fixed reference point by which to observe the psyche as science has in the material world.

Because the effects of the unconscious can only be inferred, Jung compared our dual perceptions of the inner and outer worlds historically, over time. He found that consciousness is relative to changes in focus which reflect swings in our development.

This book is a story and an example of how such changes may be perceived when a dialogue, an exchange of ideas, is entered into with the symbolic figures of the unconscious. This dialogue is presented in the form of an exchange between four figures. Three represent the unconscious standpoint; the fourth, the reactions of consciousness to the spiritual/philosophical demands which initiate the individuation process.

It began with eight illustrations portending the journey in pictorial form, and these are dispersed throughout the text according to the development of the ideas with which they are associated. The conversations describe the gradual elaboration of them through focus and concentration on dream images. Poetry seemed best suited to express the emotional conflicts I experienced and so began a sixteen-year process of recording my reflections on the “voices” which speak though the unconscious.

As self-reflecting animals, we are many things. Our natures will always defy our own definitions, for we are not products of ego-ideals. We are natural beings shaped by inborn functions with which earthly reality has outfitted us. To come to terms with our own wholeness; to resolve the split between man and nature, conscious and unconscious, science and religion, we will be compelled to listen to nature more closely — beyond the loud din of those who cannot hear her voice. It is the soft, almost inaudible whisper of the human soul that wants to be heard: the search for subjective truth in a concrete world of illusion.

See Amazon.Read preface.

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April 20, 2020 · 4:29 pm

Jung’s ‘Mysticism’

“God goes on working as before, like an unknown quantity in the depths of the psyche. We do not even know the nature of the simplest thought, let alone the ultimate principles of the psyche. Also, we have no control over its inner life. Because this inner life is intrinsically free and not subject to our will and intentions, it may easily happen that the living thing chosen and defined by us will drop out of its setting, the man-made image, even against our will. Then perhaps we could say with Nietzsche, “God is dead.” Yet it is truer to say, “He has put off our image, and where shall we find him again?” The interregnum is full of danger, for the natural facts will raise their claim in the form of various isms, which are productive of nothing but anarchy and destruction because inflation and man’s hybris between them have elected to make the ego, in all its ridiculous paltriness, lord of the universe.” Carl Jung

Because it contains our living history in symbolic imagery, Jung wrote that any serious inquiry into the unconscious leads straight into the religious problem. What he meant is not exactly what Stephen Hawking imagined as “knowing the mind of God” through the study of matter. It can’t be defined or measured as precisely as physicists might prefer; and though it can be described empirically, Hawking’s ideal is an intellectual paradigm with no psychological foundation to support it.

Jung’s theory of different but equally valid psychic realities based on his types studies, the subjectivity of consciousness, the collective spirit of the times, the unconscious foundations of perception, the symbolic nature of the psyche, and the accidental and irrational realities of life make the study of the mind (and God) a very uncertain business.

Behind Jung’s empiricism lay a wealth of experiences and intuitions which led to his studies of symbols. Because he based his analysis of them on a comparative historical foundation, they don’t really look like science to the standard formula of observation, experiment, repetition, and verification of the physical model (though, both forms of inquiry are intimately related). But, as he insisted, it’s the only way we can observe ourselves outside the subjective limitations of a subtly ever-changing consciousness yet bound to its own time and place.

Unconscious complexes express our functioning through symbolic ideas, and Jung’s work was a conceptual attempt to relate us to the instinctual processes which push them into awareness. Emotions in general, and religious ones in particular, point to different needs than thought alone can perceive. Without some feeling-sense of how the psyche works — some concept of its irrationality — we’re stuck in the intellect with no relation to the psychic functions which would maintain our connection to natural reality.

Consciousness has changed considerably since the last generation of religious authorities instructed a believing flock on its accountability before God. Though lacking psychological knowledge, conscious devotion along with a philosophical mindset maintained the functional requirements with which nature outfitted us to contend with ourselves. But, the old metaphysical projections were not just static reflections of conscious development at a given point in time.

Inflated ideas of divine heritage were not only symbols of how we once conceived ourselves but images of what we would become. The unconscious contains our history as well the seeds of our futures. Today, the old symbols are a frightening revelation of an ego so enamored with itself that it would willfully and knowingly destroy all that would sustain it and its children while still maintaining the god-given right to do so.

Otherworldly fixations (yet based on unconscious religious images), along with our self-appointed, primitive, ego-based stewardship of the earth, have morphed into crimes against nature of cosmic proportion. Today, we’re contending with everything and everyone but our own inner natures.

The intuitive wisdom of the past was too subjectively and concretely conceived to apply to our modern conflicts. The new objectivity, however, is as literal and collective as the old view, though our values now shift to the material world — and with it, new forms of destruction.

The soul, the now-extinct and forgotten religious prototype of the individual’s relation to a greater natural reality, now lies buried beneath statistical averages and social norms: the only truth the rational viewpoint can connect with. The contemporary cult of the commercial mass-man reflects an inner disorientation, and no objective science can replace the soul’s value.

The history of our mental functioning was the focus of Jung’s work. To discover new meaning in the old symbols requires a psychological/spiritual model. In a culture driven by scientific materialism, the history of who we really are is repressed and denied to such an extent that we no longer recognize our animal natures; though, our world predicament still echoes that time-worn ancient story.

Self-confrontation was once the basis of religious conversion: the first-half charge of youth to forge its place in the world was eventually driven to reflect on a reality greater than its struggle with the external environment. The wisdom of the ages provided the reference points for that transition. Today, there are no ages of wisdom to submit to, no greater realities to accept or convert to. The new truth is a pre-packed conformity, marketed as progress, devoid of the history which alone informs where we are in our development.

The old road map no longer reflects the topography of inner life. Our GPS vision can’t pinpoint the intimate personal by-ways of the compulsions, phobias, depressions, anxieties, and over-consumption which now betray the soul’s repression. Understanding the changes in consciousness, especially in the last century, becomes more important with each new technological advancement.

The scientization of the soul can’t tame the beast in us any more than could the subjective half-truths of the former view. The soul doesn’t care about logic, statistics, or light-years. It’s function is the emotional stability of the individual. As Jung remarked: a million zeroes don’t add up to one.

The alien face of an objective history now stares back at us through Nietzsche’s dead god, the backward self-deception of commercialism, the needy diversions of technological obsession — “disorders” in those whose unconscious natures can’t and won’t be reconciled to a cultural norm which only accentuates them.

Below the material, the metaphysical, the new intellect’s subjective objectivity, the dark mirrors of the soul seek the reflection of conscious light. Modern examples of the spiritual/emotional processes behind Jung’s symbolic view hold little value for the narrow commercial focus of our world-view today.

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December 12, 2019 · 3:53 pm

The Unconscious Spirit

Jung’s model of the psyche was a basic one with an immense body of empirical material behind it. It often requires going back to fundamentals to re-think the misconceptions he strove to clarify. More so today than in his time, an object-focused ego-perspective has difficulty connecting with the subjective nature of knowledge he advanced.

The insights of depth psychology: our animalness, our bisexuality (psychically, not sexually) and the inherently spiritual character of the psyche — which general knowledge is supported by the respective disciplines — are more or less loose, dissociated facts until we can incorporate them into a meaningful whole. Today’s specialized disciplines are so exclusive, it’s much too easy to lose sight of the psychological implications of that knowledge. One of the tasks of psychology is to give our search a human direction.

What Jung saw as scientific materialism in the nineteenth and twentieth century — a counter-swing away from metaphysics toward natural inquiry — only gains momentum into the new millennium, as commercial interests enhance and exploit our fascination with things and technology in ever more deceptive ways.

Just as an unconscious worldly spirit worked beneath the surface of alchemy to balance an otherworldly religious perspective and guide it back to earthly reality, the latest extreme swings toward its opposite. Symbolic disorders are replete with projections which, if not in theory at least in practice, are designed to relieve us of our spiritual confusion. What were once religious problems between man, god, and nature are now conflicts between man, his culture, and his own nature.

A neglected soul imparts little wisdom to an intellect bound to the senses, and the universal mysteries once projected into religious ideas have fallen back into the personal psyche. As Jung showed, consciousness can in no way contend with such powerful instinctual forces solely on its own devices. Though we would be superhuman, our animal natures belie our grandiose self-images no less today than a thousand years ago.

Jung intuited the image of man as pre-determined to an unknown extent. Just as every seed contains its future form, each is compelled toward what nature intended it to be. From the dawn of consciousness, symbolized in the story of Eden, through our evolution into civilized societies, natural instinctive processes have guided our development. The idea of being “made in the image of God” was a symbolic intuition of it, intended to carry forward that distant seed of innate natural wisdom.

The specific energy designed by nature to produce consciousness is generated by unconscious conflicts between contending stages of development. Every child is outfitted with the forms corresponding to their progression. On a deeper level than parental instruction, these archetypes support and prepare the developing mind and push it through its evolutionary history into the contemporary stage – give or take five hundred years or so.

The process of becoming self-aware condensed in the story of Eden was felt as disobedience (or opposition) to the law of unconscious wholeness. It reflected a capacity for choice, for weighing possibilities beyond animal consciousness. As it grew, it gradually split the psyche into two separate systems. As the myth says, it was initiated not by a god but by the conflicts of conscious choice amid opposing impulses symbolized by the snake. It requires a natural spiritual function to mediate instinct in a split mind, and all choice is relative to it. Images of space and other worlds still describe our dissociation from earthly reality.

As our double-sided nature evolves, we identify with certain functions which signal new stages of development. New forms supersede older ones, though the old functions don’t disappear. The original Adam (consciousness) who emerged from the blind world of nature constitutes a profound spiritual conflict — one we can no more outgrow than the mind can outgrow the body.

The soul as mediator of spirit, of instinct, in its consciously developed form is a religious function which took centuries to define. Though it was a form of consciousness, intellectual understanding wasn’t necessary to connect with it even a century ago. The development of thought has outpaced the older form of awareness, and today we need psychological tools to understand who we are beneath the subjective veil of conscious focus. As we once bowed to a god as an image of unity, of unconscious wholeness, so we yield to natural laws.

In The Origins and History of Consciousness, Erich Neumann addressed the uneven psychological development of the modern individual: “This betrays itself in many ways — for example, as a technologist he may be living in the present, as a philosopher in the period of the Enlightenment, as a man of faith in the Middle Ages and as a fighter of wars in antiquity — all without being in the least aware how, and where, these partial attitudes contradict each other.”

We’re products of nature. Beneath the illusion of conscious unity, we live on in old philosophical assumptions which have passed unexamined from generation to generation: symbols which secretly reveal our split natures. Our scientific materialism today is too deeply opposed to the natural symbolic view to facilitate reconciliation. Its truth is in need of its opposite. The door to that opposite was opened by Jung’s comparative method, and we need to swing it wide to contend with the dangerous extremes produced by our conscious/unconscious natures.

For an idea of the emotional processes which lead back into the symbolic world of reflection, read more here, or visit Amazon.

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August 2, 2019 · 4:31 pm

Jung’s Energic Theory

“A changing consciousness begins to sense the gravity of its own historical foundations, causing a profound collision between the two perspectives. The conflict of opposites now moves into the foreground as ego intuits the deeper pull of functions which exceed choice and free will. In terms of Jung’s energic theory, this is one of the vital steps toward a conscious recognition of the inner gradient — the narrow gate referred to in the Bible. The reactions that follow reflect the fear of being taken over by the “alien will” of the unconscious and its steady aim toward wholeness. As it continues to seize hold, dreams flow along this gradient to establish bridges which would further connect an isolated modern perspective to the still-living history of the instinctual psyche.” A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

The focus of this post is, Carl Jung’s On Psychic Energy, the first chapter in his eighth volume, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. In it, he examines the bases of the two general concepts by which the psyche interprets the world: the causal, mechanistic view and the energic, or final, viewpoint.

The causal view, Jung wrote, “… conceives an event as the effect of a cause, in the sense that unchanging substances change their relations to one another according to fixed laws.”

From the energic standpoint, “the event is traced back from effect to cause on the assumption that some kind of energy underlies the changes in phenomena… The flow of energy has a definite direction (goal) in that it follows the gradient of potential in a way that cannot be reversed… The concept, therefore, is founded not on the substances themselves but on their relations, whereas the moving substance itself is the basis of the mechanistic view.”

He explained the two concepts as the logical reversal of one another. One points backward in time to a cause, and the other points forward to a goal or purpose without positing a cause: the difference between our conscious perceptions of moving bodies in space and psychic images and intuitions of their relations and how they may serve unconscious purposes.

Though, conceptually, the viewpoints are mutually exclusive, a compromise has resulted in which an event is conceived “as partly causal, partly final – a compromise which gives rise to all sorts of theoretical hybrids but which yields, it cannot be denied, a relatively faithful picture of reality. We must always bear in mind that despite the most beautiful agreement between the facts and our ideas, explanatory principles are only points of view, that is, manifestations of the psychological attitude and of the a priori conditions under which all thinking takes place.”

This distinction was extrapolated by Jung from Freud’s reductive analysis which followed from philosophical concepts which assumed the causal sequence as the defining one. The idea of unconscious energy flowing toward a ‘gradient of potential’ had always indirectly inserted itself into the causal concept, but more so with the increasing sophistication of physical science and its acknowledgment of the subjective factor. Most philosophers aren’t scientists (and vice versa), and the hybrid of the two concepts Jung referred to was the result of a less precise psychology yet to elaborate a psychic equivalent of the physical processes.

The fusion of concrete perceptions with unconscious images accentuated the personal equation. The “beautiful agreement between facts and ideas” happens when we interpret a set of facts based on a subjective viewpoint which confuses contradictory ideas of cause and purpose without distinguishing intellectually where and how they may differ owing to unknown variables. It turned out that the dual nature of the psyche required both interpretations to arrive at a more objective description of our behavior. The final concept yields a different set of facts bound to an equally objective reality beneath the causal assumption: it follows the flow of psychic energy toward an undefinable purpose. In this way, Darwin arrived at his theory of evolution and the idea of natural development.

We understand that physical and mental processes may be mutually influential – who has not awakened from a dream with heart pounding, shaken and perspiring? Yet, current knowledge cannot explain how it occurs. The mysterious process by which neurological impulses or chemical reactions become psychic images to a perceiving consciousness is beyond our ken. That being said, it is impossible to assign primacy to one or the other. Psychologically, however, we can refine our observations based on the precision of the concepts we use to distinguish the movement of ‘objects’ and their relations.

So far as Nature is concerned this is a dynamic process only artificially dissected for purposes of inspection by a subjective observer. These classifications don’t exist in Nature but are projections of the qualities of consciousness: to dissect, discriminate, and organize thought. Since recent biology assures us that all life is purposive, the energic viewpoint has likewise emerged as a valuable explanatory principle.

Aside from the fact that the physical laws of energy do not account for the phenomena of life or how the living organism transforms energy, the body’s impulses must also contain a psychic aspect; otherwise it would be impossible for an image to be produced by them. To assign primacy to one or the other then becomes a value judgment – the projection of a subjective bias by the observer.

Yet most of natural science conceives physical processes to be primary – “unjustly, for it cannot be substantiated…” as Jung wrote. This fact is consistent with how opposites work and the uncertainty of evaluating intuitions as they apply to subjective emotions.

Read the preface to my account of how I followed Jung’s ideas and experienced the emotional changes they can produce.

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June 10, 2019 · 3:05 pm

A 21st Century Look at Jung’s Concept of Individuation

For those not appreciative of the subtler forms of satire, I thought hard about re-doing this post in a more serious tone — however, I failed utterly. Because I think it’s an accurate description of Jung’s psychology of mid-life, and because satire can be a meaningful way of approaching unfamiliar ideas, I let it stand with one caveat: my projections onto the conventional perception of Jung’s ideas are my own small biases against the extraverted interpretation of the psychological facts he established through his work.

Jung arrived at his concept of individuation by comparing his own inner experiences to historical ideas; their connections to themes in myth and literature, and similar ideas in his patients: a scientific attempt to provide a broad compendium of associations to the central images forming the structure of the unconscious mind. The process of coming to terms with the unconscious meant discerning one’s unique personality from the cultural demands dominating the first half of life. That may appeal to those with a morbid susceptibility to inner compulsion, but let’s consider this idea from a more realistic social standpoint.

His speculations of a ‘psychological’ change accompanying menopause startled me. The changes in physiology initiated by hormonal diminution were actually seen by Jung as also effecting an emotional development designed to accentuate contrasexual ‘spiritual’ functions. How physical processes and spirituality are linked to homosexual fantasies, I couldn’t discern.

Far-fetched though it seems, this idea revolved around a bizarre model in which mind and body appeared as reciprocal factors designed for ‘purposes’ beyond physical need, social adjustment, or even consciousness. Though today we know the conscious mind is relatively self-sustaining and merely endures the body as the crude vehicle of an out-grown animal heritage (viz., eating, having sex and going to the bathroom), Jung yet conceived it as the basis of deeper aims which couldn’t be seen or touched (!).

He believed that natural processes don’t necessarily adhere to rational scientific ideas. Stages of development appeared to him as fluid and relative, interpenetrating to such a complex degree that nothing could really be certain (where’s the science in that?). Beyond the instinctual maintenance of the body, Jung theorized ‘subjective’ psychic processes which could be inferred (fantasized?) through personal emotional experience. ‘Unconscious’ drives were discernible through indirect reflections in behavior and were thought to develop according to natural laws.

FYI: an interesting, though equally irrational, supplement to Jung’s model was the idea of ‘centroversion’ introduced by Erich Neumann, a long-time member of his cult. It was intended as a complement to Jung’s concepts of introversion and extraversion, the psychic mechanisms adapting us to inner and outer ‘worlds’. These spontaneous movements of ‘psychic energy’ were seen as alternating of their own accord (what?!) as demands change with development and the effects of the environment. Bear with me.

It was Neumann’s further contention that centroversion is the organizing and directing function which coordinates the other two mechanisms in the gradual unfolding of consciousness, much like Jung’s outlier concept of the Self. Though it smacks of a philosophical chimera in an atheistic age, it was meant as a description of an ‘innate’ force behind the evolution of the individual as well as the species (what happened to God?)!

Anyway, it doesn’t begin to emerge until conscious development reaches a certain stage of separation from the ‘unconscious’. Many begin to feel disoriented, with vague and unidentifiable ‘yearnings’ (?) and a sense that something is missing in their lives. Such disturbances may correspond to the isolated experiences of a few rejected members of society, but it can’t in any way be indicative of healthy participation in the social norm.

Though Jung postulated this stage as reaching its peak at mid-life, he speculated that transitional periods could be so relative to personal experience, even early dreams and memories could portend it; that ‘symbols’ actually referred to functions which guide the unfolding of our natures — even preceding the menopausal stage. He saw them as compensatory attempts by an ‘inner self’ to maintain connection to it during critical stages in its shifts toward individual differentiation. What this might mean for society wasn’t elaborated.

Despite the fact that logic dictates our modern collective direction, Jung presumed this to be an illusion; that we’re driven by an over-valued intellect fueled by egotistical hubris. Though we know that science is our only defense against an inferior and hostile Nature, he suggested they were actually self-aggrandized aversions to an unconscious history fashioned largely by an innate animal-like earthly reality (never mind cause and effect). He and Neumann even suggested an inherent spiritual function in it centered around inner awareness and not just biological and social needs!

For a reflecting consciousness, they maintained, ‘instincts’ appear as religious symbols intended to compensate our primitive natures and not just crude misinterpretations of cause and effect. How such irrational fantasies could possibly signify objective processes is untenable in the light of modern science.

Since we’re largely unaware of this transition, we don’t know what’s happening when it insinuates itself; it’s too opposed to consciousness (I wonder why!). Jung insisted that we ‘project’ inner events onto the screen of outer circumstances. The changes in our personalities are reflected back to us through relationships: divorce, career change, new love-interests, a profound sense of inferiority, or the sudden onset of depression and/or compulsive behavior. The marvels of modern medications were yet unknown in Jung’s day.

The real purpose of these conflicts is to re-focus an exterior orientation to the ‘internal’ authority which precipitates the changes. What is this superstitious, quasi-religious obsession with some ‘thing’ greater than ourselves? Neumann further added that the effects of centroversion were always the motive force behind development, the reason the symbols seemed to conform from stage to stage. Focus on the outer world in the first half of life prompts us to see their effects as originating in the environment.

That this is only partially so, slowly dawns on the mind that can discern its own psychic activity ‘within’. They perceived this as a sort of religious/philosophical fantasy, though because we’re unconscious of its symbols as the organizers of psychic life, it’s traditionally projected onto dogmatic figures — references to the occult mindset of centuries ago. Put on your waders, they went further:

If, with psychological knowledge, the conscious mind confronts its own ‘background’ and is able to withdraw its projections from these invisible figures through conscious re-interpretation and emotional experience, it may discover the hidden language of ‘analogy’ in them — thus magically entering into a new stage of awareness! The inward attention is supposed gradually to connect us with a ‘psychic reality’ behind the changes. It begins to appear as a dual process in which outer and inner events reflect parallel paths of development. What this actually refers to, I couldn’t determine. How many realities do you see?

That opposing forces merge energies toward a purposeful end is not a new idea. The positive and negative poles which combine to produce electricity are familiar to everyone. But, Jung conceived this material truth (fasten your seat-belts) to apply to the mind as well! He implied that the analogy could acquaint us with the contrasts and contradictions between different ways of viewing life in the ‘transition’ from an external orientation to an ‘internal’ one. The collision of the two perspectives intended to inform the new direction creates the mental confusion designed to push us into it! Who’s confused?

Though many have observed that the individual relives the biological stages of humanity which precede its modern state; and though history portrays the intellect as gradually emerging from a rude emotional matrix, Jung actually saw this process as being driven by religious imperatives deeply embedded in the psyche and not by social and cultural exchange. The absurdity of this premise is apparent today.

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Tagged as coming to terms with the unconscious, contrasexual spiritual functions., Erich Neumann's concept of centroversion, Jung's concept of individuation, psychic reality, symbols as organizers of psychic life, the hidden language of analogy, the psychology of mid-life

January 14, 2019 · 1:41 pm

Image, Symbol, and Psychic Reality

“The unconscious attracts the conscious mind to its aims via the symbol… Jung’s empirical investigations show dream-symbols to be the means through which psychic energy is transferred to consciousness; the image is the form of that energy. Dreams often anticipate moods and feelings which may persist for a considerable time, allowing certain ideas in them to take hold and stimulate thought as it is slowly and subtly influenced toward a more symbolic reality.” — A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

I was always fascinated by Jung’s examples of synchronistic events, and many likewise share an interest in the shadow-side of our mostly artificial, conscious-bound lives. However perceived, they’re psychic facts which reveal another realm beyond our usual mundane experiences. Seldom do they conform to traditional notions of them.

They defy scientific and religious preconceptions alike — part of the irrational mystery, not only of consciousness, but of a natural reality which can’t be pinned down by logical thought. This mystery can be so unsettling to our self-images as to be a severe blow to those whose fear and insecurity is compensated by hopeful and exaggerated certainties. It nonetheless imposes itself with such persistence that only the most rational could not at least be impressed by it.

Jung wrote that one of the main features of synchronistic events appears to be their connection to archetypal situations. By archetypal, Jung referred to those instinctual functions common to all and which correspond to the average run of human experience: death, transitional stages, and other such events as evoke heightened unconscious activity; decisive conflicts which have shaped relations to objective reality through eons.

Because of this evolutionary level of experience, Jung suggested that archetypal images operate in the animal psyche in the same way they do in us, only perhaps less consciously. Though this idea logically proceeds from established history, the nature of conscious focus often blocks our experience of it, just as animals live it in relative unconsciousness.

Unlike ‘lower’ animals, however, we may perceive it more or less consciously, retrieve memories of it at will (some, anyway), and weigh its future possibilities (sometimes) — important functions of dreams, our vivid memories of them, and our capacity to reflect on them.

Collectively, we see ourselves as having moved beyond instinctual behavior (an objective measure of our lack of self-awareness), though traditional religious and philosophical assumptions have long described our split psyches in one form or another. Even our remote ancestors, more attuned to nature than we are, reveal those self-flattering, compensating ego-fantasies in much the same way we’re possessed by them today — an artificial reality which deceives us immeasurably about our true natures.

Owing to our animal heritage, it only makes sense that instinctual life-energies express natural processes conforming to an earthly reality. This, despite religious fantasies conceiving ego as somehow co-existing in an ethereal universe beyond nature and the earth — a descriptive projection and a much different view of ourselves than conventional wisdom has conditioned us to accept. Such ideas graphically illustrate Jung’s conception of psychic reality: they’re very real to those who believe in them, even as they reveal a deeper, more symbolic nature.

They don’t presently belong to the common stock of accepted truths. For anyone who’s had ‘other-worldly’ experiences though, Jung’s concepts are an avenue by which to see them as natural events which occur among all people in all times. That they can’t be explained in terms of cause and effect is further incentive to explore our assumptions about an irrational reality beyond human logic.

It might be productive to look at the problem the other way round and see our affinity with animals rather than how we’re distinct from them. One experience in particular helped me to recognize that affinity (apart from the entire history of our development) when I was in my late twenties:

It was a very decisive period in my life; my closest friend of many years had died in a car accident, and I felt the need to be more connected with nature than the city streets I’d become accustomed to during the previous few years. I moved to the country, got a dog, and began a new life without my old friend.

Soon, I had a dream in which I saw a great severed tree trunk next to my bed. It was very thick, about three feet high, and I touched it. I thought it was the hardest and most concrete thing I could imagine. Suddenly, it began to undulate like a a belly dancer. This trunk which was so cut-off and inert, was yet so pliable and alive, I was astounded. I felt a profound mystery as I watched it sway.

Shortly afterward, I’d cut some lumber for a home project and left ten or so small blocks of wood in the yard. The next morning, planning to gather them up, I looked out through the window…

There, in front of the house lay my dog, fast asleep. Surrounding her in a circle were five blocks of wood I’d cut the previous day. She’d carefully chosen the random blocks to lay about her and then curled up to sleep within the circle she’d made.

I didn’t have to know anything about the symbolic attributes of the number five or the circle, or even the dog, to feel the strange emotional impression of the sight of her sleeping there in the protective sphere her own dog’s imagination had arrayed. I knew intuitively it was meaningful.

Later experiences, along with Jung’s concepts, helped me understand the natural energy gravitating around this experience which drew my dog to express the archetypal symbols which prompted her through me — though emotionally, I still didn’t need any reasons for it, nor did I ever really seek any. Subsequent study of the history of symbols only reinforced its mystery and meaning to me.

The emotional impact alone was enough for me to accept it as ultimately beyond comprehension, though somehow not requiring any explanation to clarify it. The experience of them convinced me of their reality. In fact, it would almost have seemed a sacrilege to try to explain them — and I was not a religious man in my late twenties.

I did question such things later in an attempt to understand them. But, in the end, it didn’t really matter. I never lost that awe. Is it ignorant? Unscientific? Too emotionally credulous? Or a natural reaction to the mystery of life obscured by the dull certitude of fact and knowledge and accepted opinion?

For more background on these ideas, read the preface to my book.

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February 19, 2018 · 1:33 pm

A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious — Preface

“Beneath our scientific preoccupations, we remain in the stage of psychological awareness reflected in our religious heritage. Behind the curtain of moral judgment lurk the split figures of good and evil: a model of how we relate to our unconscious natures. Jung has described how those ideas reflect the positive and negative poles necessary to produce psychic energy: the sliding scale along which consciousness fluctuates in its on-going efforts to define itself. Just as it forms the path of collective history, so in the growth of the individual in the first half of life, the repression of the unconscious required for ego to strengthen and develop now creates circumstances which signal the need for a new relation to it — to balance conscious direction; to relate it, make it relative to the counter-pole of inner development.” — A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

In a previous post I introduced the illustrations in my book. Some time ago, I posted three successive articles on the major themes stated in the preface: Part I, PART II, and Part III; each, a brief summary of the ideas which formed the basis of the book.

For the more serious-minded students of Jung’s psychology, I offer the preface in its entirety. It includes brief descriptions of my personal motives in writing the book, as well as cultural analogies of the individual process: an attempt to shed light on the transitional conflicts which seem to me to be shaping collective reactions to the forward movements of the unconscious.

The preface is a discursive outline of the broader premise of the text: the need for a new relation to the unconscious for the purpose of abetting a more conscious transition from a religious conception of nature to a scientific one and beyond — to a psychological one which would better equip us to confront our own natures.

Read the preface.

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Category Archives: Psychology

A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious II

A MID-LIFE PERSPECTIVE: CONVERSATIONS WITH THE UNCONSCIOUS

Preface

Observations on Politics

Guess What? You’re an Animal II

Guess What? You’re an Animal

A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious

Jung’s ‘Mysticism’

The Unconscious Spirit

Jung’s Energic Theory

A 21st Century Look at Jung’s Concept of Individuation

Image, Symbol, and Psychic Reality

A Mid-Life Perspective: Conversations With The Unconscious — Preface

Psychology And Personality Development From A Jungian Perspective

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